Latest research showing what bullshit artists wine critics are

Wall Street Journal -  A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion
They pour, sip and, with passion and snobbery, glorify or doom wines. But studies say the wine-rating system is badly flawed. How the experts fare against a coin toss.

Even birds can do it

Here’s what happened. Shigeru Watanabe (a psychologist at Keio University in Tokyo and possibly a man in league with the birds) set up a nefarious experiment. Watanabe showed children’s paintings to pigeons; a panel of adults had deemed each work either good or bad. He trained the pigeons to distinguish between them with a system of tasty rewards. When the pigeons pecked correctly, he gave them some seed. Later, he presented 10 paintings to the birds they had never seen. Five of these paintings had been deemed good by humans, five bad. The pigeons recognized the good paintings as “good” twice as often as they recognized the “bad” paintings. In short, they came off as pretty good critics. There are those (names withheld) writing for major publications who might do markedly less well. Given these results, Watanabe claims, “pigeons are capable of learning the concept of a stimulus class that humans name ‘good’ pictures.”
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article08260902.aspx

Paper not a lemon after all

“The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism” is a 1970 paper by the economist George Akerlof. It discusses information asymmetry, which occurs when the seller knows more about a product than the buyer. Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz jointly received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for their research related to asymmetric information. Akerlof’s paper uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty. There are good used cars and defective used cars (“lemons”), but because of asymmetric information about the car (the seller knows much more about the problems of the car than the buyer), the buyer of a car does not know beforehand whether it is a good car or a lemon. So the buyer’s best guess for a given car is that the car is of average quality; accordingly, he/she will be willing to pay for it only the price of a car of known average quality. This means that the owner of a good used car will be unable to get a high enough price to make selling that car worthwhile. Therefore, owners of good cars will not place their cars on the used car market. This is sometimes summarized as “the bad driving out the good” in the market….
Both the American Economic Review and The Review of Economic Studies rejected the paper for “triviality”, while the reviewers for Journal of Political Economy rejected it as incorrect, arguing that if this paper was correct, then no goods could be traded. Only on the 4th attempt did the paper get published in Quarterly Journal of Economics. Today, the paper is one of the most-cited papers in modern economic theory (more than 5,800 citations in academic papers as of July 2009).

“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Pricier Wine Tastes Better

A recent study shows that raising the price of wine makes it taste
better. When tasting wines they’d been told cost more,
testers’ brains showed more pleasure than when drinking cheaper
wines…even when the wines were exactly the same! The
study’s lead author is California Institute of Technology
economics professor Antonio Rangel.

mp3

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2008/01/23/segments/92291

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Champagne test

 Is It Champagne or a Substitute? Refined Palates Can Be Fooled

From NYTimes.  Critic’s sophisticate friends can’t tell Champagne from $10 sparkling wines.

Best value for money: Boyer Brut.

Video – Satire on investment professionals, sub-prime etc.

The Long Johns – The Last Laugh – George Parr – Subprime

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_qK4g6ntM&

Tells it pretty much like it is

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Do Chef’s Know Best?

“Some of Mr. McGee’s findings challenged the strict rules that still
governed cookery at that time, most based on traditional French
methods. His assertion that searing meat does not actually “seal in”
the juices rocked the culinary world.

“As a cook I wanted to believe that chefs were right, that their
experience of doing these things over and over must prove something,”
he said. “But as a scientist I could see that the evidence didn’t hold
up.” The point of searing, he said, is to create flavor through the
browning of surface chemicals. Its only effect on the juices is to pull
them out of the meat, making it drier.”

NY Times

Isaac Newton in the Kitchen
By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: November 24, 2004

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Gladwell on Profiling

Dangerous Minds

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_gladwell

Gladwell exposes profilers for what they are, i.e., bullshitters.  Illustrates connection between profiling and cold reading.

As usual with Gladwell, not much by way of real intellectual innovation, but its an entertaining read. 

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Dice roll as good as expert advice

Yet more evidence that investment professionals have no competence in their core area of “expertise”.

The Age newspaper does its own survey of experts’ buy and sell recommendations in 2005.

A couple of years later, it turns out you would have done just as well purchasing their “sells” as their “buys”.

The article draws the wrong lesson however.  It claims that the moral is to pay as much attention to the sell recommendations as to the buy ones.

The proper lesson is – pay these “experts” no attention at all.  And certainly don’t allow them to make any money at your expense.

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